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Severance is the hit sci-fi show about office workers who sever their consciousnessslipping into another mode the moment they arrive at the office, then forgetting everything about their 9-to-5 as soon as they leave. The concept was inspired by the creators own monotonous desk job before he found success in television. Part of the shows appeal lies in how familiar the premise feels: a dull, repetitive workday that people cant wait to escape. In the real world, employees dont have a mental switch to flip, but theyve found subtler, and potentially more insidious, ways to disengage. The latest trend, dubbed task-masking, has taken over Instagram and TikTok. Its all about looking busy without actually being productive: charging around the office with a laptop, pretending to be on an urgent call, or typing furiously with no real purpose. According to recent research, more than a third of U.K. workers admit to faking productivity. Task-masking doesnt just waste timeit slows career growth and hurts company performance. Employees miss out on meaningful progress and promotion opportunities. Leaders lose engagement and confidence in their teams. In short, task-masking is a problem no leader can afford to ignore. Here are some strategies to stop it. Be clear on the companys values Task-masking isnt born of laziness or lack of ambitionits a fear-based response to productivity pressure and always-on work cultures. Research from Workhuman found that strict time-tracking exacerbates the problem: When workers strongly agree they are expected to respond immediately to Slack, Teams, or other instant messages, the rate of fake productivity shoots up to 51%. To free employees from the sense that their time card matters most, leaders should clarify what the company truly values. Face time or hours logged at a desk shouldnt be measures of successmeaningful productivity should. What that looks like will vary by organization, but at Jotform, for example, it means advancing projects and meeting reasonable deadlines. It also includes less-measurable but equally valuable behaviors like showing curiosity, supporting teammates, and helping create a more engaged work culture. Leaders should also be explicit about what doesnt count: busywork, unnecessary meetings that could be handled asynchronously, and burning the midnight oil just to give the impression of busyness and commitment. Break down projects into more manageable tasks As AI and automation boost efficiency and productivity, theyve fundamentally transformed workloads. In many ways, thats a positive change. Employees can devote more time to meaningful, higher-impact work. For example, you can spend more time on strategizing and creative writing, and fewer hours sifting through your inbox and searching through meeting notes. But it also brings a challenge: When technology accelerates what you can accomplish in a day, leaders expectations often rise in tandem. The slope to burnout becomes slippery. One of the best antidotes to that pressure, especially when facing large, intimidating projects that can leave employees feeling paralyzed or faking productivity, is to break them into smaller tasks. For starters, this helps people identify steps that can be automated, eliminated, or delegated. It also makes progress more tangible. Ticking off one item at a time, with restorative breaks in between, keeps momentum steady. When a daunting to-do list is broken down into a sequence of manageable tasks, employees can work efficiently and stay on track toward deadlines without burning out. Make psychological safety a priority If task-masking is rooted in fear, a quick fix wont eliminate it. Economic downturns, global pandemics, and rapid technological change have all contributed to a heightened sense of workplace anxiety, especially among the younger generations. More than one-third (37%) of Gen Z workers fear losing their jobsmore than any other generationaccording to research from Edelmans Gen Z Lab. Creating an environment where psychological safety is a priority can help assuage career-related fears and the pressure to appear productive all the time. When employees feel safe admitting theyre stuck or uncertain, theyre less likely to mask their struggles with performative busyness. At Jotform, we have multiple channels where employees can voice their concerns, ranging from all-hands meetings and dedicated chat threads to a general management open-door policy. I make a point to share the challenges Im facing, too, in hopes that my candor will encourage others to speak openly about their own doubts and setbacks. Ultimately, leaders must be explicit about the resources available to support employees and model the transparency they want to see. A bit of vulnerability from the top can help promote psychological safety throughout an organization. Employees shouldnt fear work so much that they want to escape itthrough severance or through task-masking.
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E-Commerce
While traveling to Riyadh for the Fortune Global Forum, FII9, and the Global Health Exhibition, I witnessed something that should be a wake-up call for health systems everywhere. Saudi Arabia is already operating the kind of connected, AI-enabled healthcare infrastructure many countries are still debating how to build. At FII9, the conversation was unmistakable. Global innovation momentum is shifting toward the Middle East, and nowhere more than Saudi Arabia, where national digital platforms like Sehhaty already give millions of residents unified access to their health data. At the Global Health Exhibition, I saw population-level analytics, AI-powered diagnostics, multiomic initiatives, and interoperable infrastructure deployed at a speed and scale that would take years in other countries. It made something clear: Healthcare does not have a data problem. We have a connection problem. LIFESTYLE DRIVES OUTCOMES, BUT REMAINS CLINICALLY INVISIBLE Studies show that lifestyle and environmental factors account for more than 80% of health outcomes. A healthy lifestyle can prevent the vast majority of chronic diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. And yet, the data that reflects how people actually live, how they eat, move, sleep, and manage stress, remains largely absent from clinical care. In the United States, for example, healthcare is not suffering from a data shortage. Its drowning in data. Every day, people generate powerful information through wearables, continuous glucose monitors, fitness and sleep apps, and smart rings. As of 2023, nearly one in three Americans use a wearable to track their health, according to a Health Information National Trends Survey. These tools capture meaningful lifestyle signals that directly affect clinical outcomes. Yet almost none of this data reaches the exam room. It remains siloed on consumer platforms, invisible to clinicians, and unusable in medical decision making. This disconnect has consequences. Preventive opportunities are missed. Chronic conditions go unmanaged. Healthcare remains reactive instead of proactive. Clinicians rely on structured snapshots like lab results and prescriptions, important, but incomplete, because they capture what happens in the clinic rather than daily life. AI AS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN LIFESTYLE DATA AND CLINICAL CARE Its not that clinicians are uninterested in wearable data. Many are eager. Remote patient monitoring has grown rapidly, with a 1,300% increase in related procedures between 2019 and 2022. However, the friction points are real. Data security is a concern. Device accuracy varies. Practices often lack the IT infrastructure to onboard new tools, train staff, and integrate multiple data streams. Most importantly, clinicians are overwhelmed. More raw data is not the solution. This is why healthcare systems need a bridge that makes lifestyle data usable, reliable, and safe in clinical settings. That bridge is clinical-grade AI. When lifestyle and longitudinal behavioral datasets are used at inference time via retrieval, AIs outputs are grounded in real-world signals rather than abstract reasoning alone, distilling only the most relevant insights for the point of care. The goal is not another dashboard, but meaningful signals embedded within existing workflows that reduce burden rather than increase it. With the right tools, AI also empowers patients. Personalized, real-time guidance rooted in their own physiology helps them understand their data, make better decisions, and stay aligned with their care plan. A NATIONAL DIGITAL HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE Countries such as Saudi Arabia are demonstrating what happens when clinical and systems-level data come together. The unified national health platform Sehhaty serves as an access point for millions of residents and offers integrated services far beyond scheduling. These include secure medical records, online prescriptions, lab results, vaccination history, teleconsultations, and remote monitoring. The app reportedly contains 31 million unified health files, representing nearly 88% of the population, and 140 million online prescriptions. At the center of this transformation is the Seha Virtual Hospital, which delivers remote specialist care across 224 hospitals and dozens of specialties, including critical-care consults and AI-driven diagnostics. Investments in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and advanced AI at institutions such as King Faisal Specialist Hospital rival those of some of the best programs in the United States. The result is a coordinated model of nationwide digital health integration, something long envisioned but not yet achieved. TO BUILD THE FUTURE OF HEALTH, CONNECT THE DOTS The United States has the devices and data, but has long lacked the infrastructure and incentives to connect them meaningfully. That is beginning to shift. Recent CMS initiatives signal recognition that prevention, lifestyle data, and technology-enabled care must play a larger role in how health outcomes are measured and reimbursed. Initiatives such as MAHA ELEVATE and the CMS ACCESS Model reflect a growing shift toward prevention-first, lifestyle-driven care. MAHA ELEVATE supports Medicare pilot programs that test whether whole-person, lifestyle-based care can improve health outcomes and lower costs, while ACCESS helps bring these approaches to scale through new care delivery and outcome-based payment models. In parallel, CMS Aligned Networks is focusing on improving interoperability and coordination across the healthcare ecosystem, creating standards and incentives that allow data to move safely between patients, providers, and care teams. The opportunity is to ensure that lifestyle data are treated as essential clinical information and that AI translates complexity into actionable insight at the point of care. The most valuable health data we possess is already being captured on our wrists, in our pockets, and throughout our daily routines. The challenge is no longer collection. Its connection. To close the gap, we must treat lifestyle data as essential clinical information and not a consumer novelty. Interoperable systems must allow this information to move securely to the right stakeholders, with AI surfacing timely, relevant signals that support decision making without adding friction for clinicians or patients. Only then can healthcare move from fragmented snapshots to continuous understanding, from episodic and reactive care to a model that anticipates risk, promotes healthy behaviors, and supports the whole person. The future of healthcare is already taking shape in places such as Riyadh, where vision, infrastructure, and execution are aligned. Other countres, including the United States, can get there too, but only if we connect the dots. Noosheen Hashemi is founder and CEO of January AI.
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E-Commerce
Scott Adams, the creator of the uber-popular and satirical comic strip Dilbert, has died. He passed away on January 13, after announcing his diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer last spring. He was 68. On Tuesday morning, the cartoonists former wife, Shelly Miles, shared the news of his death during a livestream on X. Miles read from a statement that Adams had prepared himself for the occasion. I had an amazing life, the statement said. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I’m asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want. Be useful. And please know I loved you all to the very end. Dilbert was created in 1989, and it broke new ground, offering a refreshing and pointed critique of white-collar work life. It became known for its ever-relatable digs about the drudgery of office culture and insufferable bosses, long preceding relatable movies and TV shows like Office Space and The Office, which featured similar dismal (and hilarious) views of work culture years later.In its heyday, the comic strip appeared in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, with an estimated readership of more than 150 million. Adams’s strip amassed such popularity that he was named the 1997 recipient of the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award. That same year, Dilbert (the character) became the first fictional person to make Time magazine’s list of the most influential Americans.However, while Dilbert became one of the most popular cartoons of all time, Adams battled deep controversy in his later years. In 2023, hundreds of newspapers dropped the classic comic after Adams made racist comments on his podcast, saying that it no longer makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. He also described Black people as a “hate group.”Adams said his statements were taken out of context. Still, the incident, and its aftermath, effectively ended Dilbert‘s wide syndication in newspapers. Other comics weighed in, too. “He’s not being canceled. He’s experiencing the consequences of expressing his views,” Bill Holbrook, creator of the strip On the Fastrack, told The Associated Press at the time. “I am in full support of him saying anything he wants to, but then he has to own the consequences of saying them.”Regardless of Adamss troubling personal views and complicated legacy, Dilbert has played a large role in the conversation around work life. Experts say that his cartoons’ outspoken critiques of bosses and work life, which were perhaps ahead of their time, can’t be rolled back. Phil Lohmeyer, a cartoonist, animator, and middle school design teacher from Connecticut, tells Fast Company that hes confident the kind of office critiques made popular by Dilbert will live on because they are so universal. Dilbert wasn’t as much about the characters, even though the characters themselves became famous. It was more about the annoyance of middle management, he notes. Lohmeyer says that the idea truly resonated with office workers, who posted the comics in their cubicles in the 90s, or emailed them to coworkers. While younger generations might not be well-versed in Dilbert, the teacher still sees the ideas show up in his middle school classroom. The kids make fun of the rules, schedules, and more, he says. They use comic strip humor to question the system, kind of how Adams was doing years ago. While so much has changed in offices and classrooms alike, Lohmeyer says that feeling seen in your role will forever be relevant. Adams turned work issues into cartoon gags, making the previously invisible finally visible.
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E-Commerce
Iranian demonstrators’ ability to get details of bloody nationwide protests out to the world has been given a strong boost, with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service dropping its fees to allow more people to circumvent the Tehran government’s strongest attempt ever to prevent information from spilling outside its borders, activists said Wednesday. The move by the American aerospace company run by Elon Musk follows the complete shutdown of telecommunications and internet access to Iran’s 85 million people on Jan. 8, as protests expanded over the Islamic Republic’s faltering economy and the collapse of its currency. SpaceX has not officially announced the decision and did not respond to a request for comment, but activists told The Associated Press that Starlink has been available for free to anyone in Iran with the receivers since Tuesday. Starlink has been crucial, said Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian whose nonprofit Net Freedom Pioneers has helped smuggle units into Iran, pointing to video that emerged Sunday showing rows of bodies at a forensic medical center near Tehran. That showed a few hundred bodies on the ground, that came out because of Starlink,” he said in an interview from Los Angeles. “I think that those videos from the center pretty much changed everyone’s understanding of what’s happening because they saw it with their own eyes. Since the outbreak of demonstrations Dec. 28, the death toll has risen to more than 2,500 people, primarily protesters but also security personnel, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Starlink is banned in Iran by telecommunication regulations, as the country never authorized the importation, sale, or use of the devices. Activists fear they could be accused of helping the U.S. or Israel by using Starlink and charged with espionage, which can carry the death penalty. Cat-and-mouse as authorities hunt for Starlink devices The first units were smuggled into Iran in 2022 during protests over the country’s mandatory headscarf law, after Musk got the Biden administration to exempt the Starlink service from Iran sanctions. Since then, more than 50,000 units are estimated to have been sneaked in, with people going to great lengths to conceal them, using virtual private networks while on the system to hide IP addresses and taking other precautions, said Ahmad Ahmadian, the executive director of Holistic Resilience, a Los Angeles-based organization that was responsible for getting some of the first Starlink units into Iran. Starlink is a global internet network that relies on some 10,000 satellites orbiting Earth. Subscribers need to have equipment, including an antenna that requires a line of sight to the satellite, so must be deployed in the open, where it could be spotted by authorities. Many Iranians disguise them as solar panels, Ahmadian said. After efforts to shut down communications during the 12-day war with Israel in June proved to be not terribly effective, Iranian security services have taken more extreme tactics now to jam Starlink’s radio signals and GPS systems, Ahmadian said in a phone interview. After Holistic Resilience passed on reports to SpaceX, Ahmadian said, the company pushed a firmware update that helped circumvent the new countermeasures. Security services also rely on informers to tell them who might be using Starlink, and search internet and social media traffic for signs it has been used. There have been reports they have raided apartments with satellite dishes. There has always been a cat-and-mouse game, said Ahmadian, who fled Iran in 2012 after serving time in prison for student activism. The government is using every tool in its toolbox. Still, Ahmadian noted that the government jamming attempts had only been effective in certain urban areas, suggesting that security services lack the resources to block Starlink more broadly. A free Starlink could increase the flow of information out of Iran Iran did begin to allow people to call out internationally on Tuesday via mobile phones, but calls from outside the country into Iran remain blocked. Compared to protests in 2019, when lesser measures by the government were able to effectively stifle information reaching the rest of the world for more than a week, Ahmadian said the proliferation of Starlink has made it impossible to prevent communications. He said the flow could increase now that the service has been made free. This time around they really shut it down, even fixed landlines were not working, he said. But despite this, the information was coming out, and it also shows how distributed this community of Starlink users is in the country. Musk has made Starlink free for use during several natural disasters, and Ukraine has relied heavily on the service since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It was initially funded by SpaceX and later through an American government contract. Musk had raised concerns over the power of such a system being in the hands of one person, after he refused to extend Ukraine’s Starlink coverage to support a planned Ukrainian counterattack in Russian-occupied Crimea. As a proponent of Starlink for Iran, Ahmadian said the Crimea decision was a wake-up call for him, but that he couldn’t see any reason why Musk might be inclined to act similarly in Iran. Looking at the political Elon, I think he would have more interest … in a free Iran as a new market, he said. Julia Voo, who heads the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Cyber Power and Future Conflict Program in Singapore, said there is a risk in becoming reliant on one company as a lifeline, as it creates a single point of failure, though currently there are no comparable alternatives. China has been exploring ways to hunt and destroy Starlink satellites, and Voo said the more effective Starlink proves itself at penetrating government-mandated terrestrial blackouts, the more states will be observing. It’s just going to result in more efforts to broaden controls over various ways of communication, for those in Iran and everywhere else watching, she said. David Rising, Associated Press Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell and Melanie Lidman contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
As Americans struggle with an affordability crisishigh inflation and an even higher cost of living, especially when it comes to housingBilt is launching three new, low interest credit cards with rates capped at 10% on new purchases for the first yearincluding a premium card offering with a $495 annual fee. The Bilt Card 2.0 series launches next month on February 7. “Between now and January 30, existing cardholders will be able to seamlessly transition and pre-order a new Bilt Card in their Bilt account or online,” according to a statement on the company’s website. There is clearly a need for affordability at this point in time more than ever, Bilt chief executive officer Ankur Jain said in an interview with Bloomberg. It felt like we should be the brand to do this. The move follows President Donald Trump’s call last Friday for a one year, 10% limit on credit card interest rates, saying he supported the Credit Card Competition Act, a bill that if passed by Congress, could provide more oversight on credit card companies. Here’s what to know. What are the advantages of Bilt cards? Bilt cards offer mortgage and rent payments rewards, unlike many credit cards that focus on, say, travel or merchandise points. What this means is Bilt customers earn rewards just for paying their rent and mortgage bills. However, the rewards are not solely limited to that. Customers also earn points on purchases at any one of Bilt’s 45,000 partners, including everything from Walgreens to Lyft to your local gym, according to the New York Times. What are the three new Bilt 2.0 cards? There are three new Bilt Card 2.0 credit cardsincluding a premium card offering with a $495 annual fee, called the Bilt Palladium card. All three cards earn 4% back in Bilt cash on spending, and allow customers to pay their rent and mortgage with no transaction fees. Here’s a breakdown of the three cards below: BILT BLUE CARD A no-annual fee card with flexible rewards $0 annual fee BILT OBSIDIAN CARD Card offers 3X points on dining or groceries, and offers Bilt Travel Hotel credits $95 annual fee BILT PALLADIUM CARD Premium card with high-value rewards and elevated benefits like annual Bilt Cash, Bilt Travel Hotel credits, and Priority Pass $495 annual fee
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E-Commerce
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